Ask an assistant where to buy hand-poured candles in Warsaw and you get three names back, each with a reason. No ten blue links, no page two, no scanning. Three names. If yours is not one of them, you were not outranked, you were left out of the sentence.
That is the shift worth understanding. Classic search is a ranking contest: sit above the next result and earn the click. AI search is a citation contest: be the brand the model reaches for while it writes the answer. The two overlap, but they are not the same thing, and we have audited brands that rank respectably on Google while being completely absent from an assistant's reply.
Models need something short and specific to say
An assistant answering a category question has perhaps eighty words for your entire brand. It spends them on whatever it can state with confidence. A brand that can be summarised in one clean sentence gets summarised. A brand whose positioning takes three paragraphs to unpack gets skipped, not out of malice, but because there was nothing compact and reliable to quote.
Which means positioning work now has a technical payoff. When we wrote the language for Soma Warsaw, "hand-poured in small batches, forty candles per pour" was a brand sentence meant for humans. It also happens to be exactly the kind of line a model can lift into an answer without hedging.
Search engines reward the page that ranks. Assistants reward the brand they can describe in one sentence without getting it wrong.
What to actually do
Say the same thing everywhere
Your site, your Instagram bio, your Google Business profile, your marketplace shop, the About paragraph a journalist copied in 2023. Models triangulate across sources. When five of them describe you five different ways there is no confident summary to write, so the model defaults to the competitor who has one. Choose the sentence, then go and correct every profile that disagrees with it.
Ship structured data
Organization and Product schema with real prices, currency, availability and review counts. Breadcrumbs. FAQ markup on the pages that answer questions. Unglamorous, and it is the difference between a machine reading your product page and a machine guessing at it. Most Polish stores we audit carry partial or broken schema left behind by a theme, which is worse than none, because it contradicts the page it sits on.
Publish an llms.txt
A plain markdown file at the root of your domain: who you are, what you sell, what you do not sell, where you ship, and links to the pages worth reading. It takes an hour. The standard is young and not universally consumed yet, but it is the cheapest way to hand a crawler the authored version of your story instead of making it infer one from a homepage hero.
Get mentioned somewhere that is not your own site
Assistants lean on third party corroboration, because your own site is the one source guaranteed to be biased. Stockist pages, press, review platforms, forum threads, a well-argued comparison post. Three genuine mentions on other domains move an answer more than another thousand words on your own blog.
Write the answer, not the keyword
"Soy or paraffin, and how we choose" is quotable. "Candles Warsaw buy online cheap" is not; it is 2014 keyword stuffing and it reads as noise. The useful part of this transition is that the content which earns a citation is also the content that ranks, so you are no longer writing two kinds of page.
The ten minute test
Open ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. Ask each one the question your customer would really ask, in the language they would ask it: best slow fashion brands in Poland, where to buy handmade candles in Warsaw. Note who appears and note what is said about them. Then ask about your brand by name and read the description back to yourself.
Two things become obvious quickly: whether you exist in these answers at all, and if you do, whether the version of you being repeated is the one you wrote. Most brands discover they are being summarised from a three year old press release and a marketplace listing. That is fixable, and it is far cheaper to fix now than after this becomes the default way people shop.